The process of optimizing any site or landing page experience depending on any site visitor and improving the visitor’s probability to turn into a customer by following the desired instructions on the mentioned page. Online traffic is a destination of significant inconsistency. In today’s world, you have to make your probable customers perform the desired action. If you cannot win them at the first go, their chances of coming around for a second time are almost nil. Marketers understand this strategy the best.
They know that it is nothing but just an opportunity lost, where you could have won if the site visitor had taken some of the steps that would benefit you.
Online marketers understand that by running the conversion rate optimization campaigns effectively, they can improve their chances at the business and get more conversions. The importance of a good conversion rate optimization campaign is measured by saving lots of time, money, and energy and exploring new strategies and ideas for the growth of the business that is being recently discovered.
Understanding the conversion rate optimization helps you to know more about your site’s usability. It also helps to better customer behavior knowledge with tips to improve your UX to achieve your targets.
Main elements of CRO
Conversion rate optimization or CRO is the process that is spread across several stages. A campaign is successful when it can make a site more relatable to users after profound studies and research to analyze the result, runs multiple texts, tweaks more content to make it more relevant to the visitors, and draws necessary conclusions. There are six primary elements of conversion rate optimization as follows –
Landing page design
The landing page is the very first thing that any visitor gets to see. So, its design should be of utmost importance as it sets the tone for the site’s usability and success rate. A tasteful landing page will always attract more customers. The design of the page holds a lot of significance as it can make or break a deal.
If we take an example, any customer who visits amazon comes with a pure intention of buying things. So it is important to give even the most minor information to every customer about any product. So, the company has strategically designed all its product pages so that any website visitor finds it very easy to get any information about the product. And adding any item to their shopping cart would never be a big deal. one can quickly notice the prominent vibrant color, orange, and just a single tap can easily add the item on the “Add to Cart” button.
Any website visitor can never miss the prominent and vibrant color of that button on the website. Moreover, the use of excellent images of the product also helps the customers have faith in the website’s services. Thus, the landing page design is often the first thing of any website that captures visitors’ attention.
Website copy
Any well-designed and beautiful website can attract web traffic to itself, but what can turn it into potential leads is the website’s content. Words are said to mesmerize and hook any visitor verbally. That has to be employed to make your website a considerable success.
The content has to be relevant and engaging to capture the visitors’ hearts and persuade them to take the desired actions. The power of the content is the factor that decides if a visitor will stay and take necessary measures or it will leave the site without taking any action. Website copy can be further classified into Headline and Body content.
A. Headline
As the name suggests, headlines are the first and topmost lines that any viewer gets to see. It always gives the first impression of the business and its quality of services. When people like the headline, they are willing to scroll down and further look at the other things on the site. But if they are displeased at the very first line of the website, the chances of them staying on the website any longer is very little. Focussing on some of the things is necessary to get the correct headline, and they are as follows –
- a. Lower-alpha type
- b. Tea
- c. Coca Cola
B. Body content
After the headline comes to the body, which plays a fundamental role in creating a visitor’s trust in the website, mesmerizing body content is necessary. But answering the basic queries of any visitor can create the best interesting content ever. Take note of the following points to make a clear, concise, and exciting persona for your brand.
- a. Formatting – Dividing the content into short paragraphs increases the readability of the content. Use as many subheadings as possible. It makes the content more readable. Listing or adding bulletins to the body where necessary can also make its structure enjoyable. Font type, size, and color can play a significant role in attracting readers.
- b. Writing style – Set the right tone to target your audience. Use metaphors, adjectives, and other exciting elements to highlight specific areas. Talk directly to the visitors. It makes them feel special and at home. It also helps to promote faith on the site.
Answer the questions of the visitors to give them a better experience of the services of the business. Adding keywords is another thing that gives better results and increased overall usability.An awesome heading with beautiful content that is short, up to a point, and Answers all queries, will certainly be eye-catching and intriguing.
Call-to-Action
The Call-to-Action (CTA) is absolutely what its name suggests. Add a specific and proper way by which customers can contact the person who can help them by solving their doubts or taking the desired action. The actions can also be subscribing to a newsletter or booking a slot in some seminar. Creating a robust and small CTA that takes the minimum amount of time of any user can result in a maximum number of leads.
Search for more interesting CTAs that work best to result in more conversions. It is a powerful tool that plays a significant role in the attraction of leads.
Navigation and site structure
Who loves complexities? No one is right! The same goes for website visitors—none like to handle a complex site. The structure of the site must target to build an experience that is particularly easy to navigate. Site structure is the primary thing behind any action. It is typically the knowledge of how different pages of your website can interact with each other.
Different websites have different navigations, but the primary example is always the hierarchy style. A user starts navigating from the homepage and then arrives at and explores the list of categories and subcategories. If the entire process is as easy as explained here, it will not be difficult for users to handle and navigate the site.
The real problem arises when the site is not structured correctly, and they get lost in their search for something. It will ultimately lead the confused people to leave the site and search for other areas to give them their desirable services.
In short, creating an easy, fluid, and easy to navigate website can help to increase conversions.
Forms
Forms are essential for some companies especially if it belongs from the sales background. Forms are mainly customer touchpoints. Optimizing them will help the company to understand and improve its conversion rate. You will get many suggestions over the internet on making an excellent and efficient form for your company; they may or may not work for all the businesses. However, always try to balance the lead quality and the volume of leads that get the best ROI. Here are four tips to make your forms outstanding-
(i) Keep the fields few –
Keeping the areas fewer makes it better by making it less time-consuming. However, this trick works most of the time but not all the time, especially when your business is from the marketing funnel. There, the team requires additional information, and it focuses only on those that are serious leads, and they can get further details depending on other fields.
(ii) Make it good-looking –
A pleasant user experience is often related to stunning forms. Keep the documents sound by keeping the text clear and prominent with consistent styling. Keep the tooltips and validation in the proper place. You can also categorize and arrange the fields according to their importance – starting with the more important ones and ending with the least important ones. Experimenting with progress forms can also improve the rate of conversions.
(iii) Easy password creation –
Making password creation easy can lighten the whole form filling process. According to some studies, the password of any form takes up most of the time to fill. As seen and everywhere, inspiring the users to create a solid yet easy password to remember is of immense help for both the user and the company.
(iv) Keep it to one-click forms –
Who doesn’t want to get work done with just a few taps? This one-click form submits it can work wonders for any conversion process.
Page speed
Page speed has a significant impact on the performance of the business. The page loading time affects the user experience directly at the first go. Longer page loading time can result in lower conversion rates of the site, and in turn, the business rank on the search engine gets affected.
Some studies show that if any site loads in 1.7 seconds, it’s way faster than 75% of the other sites. Moreover, people are no longer willing to wait. A bit longer in the page loading drives people away from the area, searching for something faster. A minimum of one-second delay can make you reduce your conversions by 11%.
Calculation of conversion rate
The fundamental formula for conversion rate is :
Conversion rate = Total number of conversions/ Total number of sessions
Here’s an example –
For suppose, in a month, your website arrives at a total of 100,000 sessions and lists 10,000 orders. The conversion rate for your site is = 10,000/100,000 = 10%Number of visitors used in the formula
When you take a look at your program’s analytics, you will get to see the number of sessions used in the formula. Even if a single user pays a visit to the site twice, it will result in two sessions in the calculation. It is because ‘unique visitors’ is the metric that is being used for the analyses.
Any successful Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) program includes in it the integrated costs and revenues. These formulas come in the form of Pay-Per click (PPC), Return on investment (ROI), and Average Order Value (AOV).
The formulas can seem to be a bit scary. But with time, you will get used to the basic math used here.
To get the pay-per-click (PPC) for an advertising campaign in a minimum way, you should always calculate the budget for your campaign, cost per click, and its impacts on profit.
Two elements control the success of online paid campaigns. They are – The cost required for the campaign and The revenue generated. The amount spent per click can permanently impact the profit margin of your business.
Tools required for CRO
The three types of ultimate vital tools required for Conversion Rate Optimization are as follows –
- Web analytics tool – This is an essential tool that helps you keep an eye on the immediate website conversion rate and metric success performance. You can get good visitor awareness and also catch hold of poorly converting pages to make improvements. An example of a simple web analytics tool is Google Analytics. It needs to be set up first for use.
- Visitor feedback tools – Feedback from visitors can give you an enormous ground to improve your site to make user usability and navigation easier. It helps you to understand their requirements and also gives you great ideas for improvements. And this ultimately results in high conversion rates. Visitor feedback tools like Hotjar.com are essential. User tester tools like Userfeel.com are also necessary.
- An A/B testing tool – This tool comes in handy when you are stuck between two choices and cannot decide which one will be better for the website visitors. It usually arises for choosing the Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons, page layouts, and so on. It helps you to understand which one will bring in more conversion rates. Some great tools to start with for a low-cost A/B testing tool are VWO.
Benefits of doing CRO
Get to know your customers better
Even in online Marketing, retailers need to know the requirements of the customers. Know your customers well so that you can stock what your customers require, increasing your conversion rates. It will also be helpful to be able to market them wisely. It is where Conversion Rate Optimization helps you immensely to enhance your e-commerce business.
Testing is also an essential part of getting assured that your online business is running effectively. CRO helps you to know who your customers are and with whom you are precisely dealing, along with knowing their necessities and preferences.
If you are still planning to take some CRO initiatives for your business website, it will be best to start by doing some conversion research and understanding it from the depth. Understand well the visitors’ interaction with your service and the problems that are causing the thinning of your sales. Gather data and learn more about your customers, their requirements, and challenges. Develop user personas for your site with conversion optimization and understand who you are marketing to.
Increase your customers
it is the best part that everyone is in search of. CRO can help you to reduce the cost per acquisition in your e-commerce. Continue optimizing your store, and after knowing your customers well, you can also improve their overall shopping experience. It will attract your better web traffic.
Better the user experience for visitors, the more the customers you get, and the more rapidly your business grows. You get to save your money by making more of it as it will gradually cost you less when you acquire more customers.
Streamline your store and make it more engaging to capture the visitor’s attention. That interest can turn any random visitor into a loyal customer. The significant advantage that you can receive through CRO is detected and find a solution to the short span of attention of the customer of the present time and giving them precisely what they are looking for.
It Becomes Your Secret Weapon
When you apply CRO to your site, you get an edge higher than the websites that are not using it. Your competitors may or may not use CRO. But if they are not using it, they will start with it very soon because everyone has to use it one day. When you apply search engine optimization or social media marketing to your store, your contestant can easily understand it by analyzing your store. But when it comes to CRO, they can’t understand it immediately as the optimization is done on all levels and is a nice mix of everything.
So understanding it without any prior knowledge about Conversion Rate Optimization is a bit difficult. CRO becomes this secret weapon when you work with the data related to your environment. The results can vary, and a single strategy doesn’t need to work for every e-commerce website.
Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value
Everything and every e-commerce site aim to get people to visit their site and purchase their item, which will lead to conversions. Giving out some special offers and discounts can also bring in more customers. It motivates people to make purchases. But the absence of optimization will ultimately lead the most effective marketing campaigns to get invalidated. CRO guides site visitors to make some purchases. It makes your marketing more effective, and your customers come back eventually for more purchases once they enjoy their first shopping experience. It ultimately boils down to higher customer lifetime values.
What is a reasonable conversion rate?
It is often the most significant query of the majority of the people. Now, we come to the answer. The reasonable rates of conversion can vary. Conversion rates depend significantly on your website type, unique value schemes, and marketing struggles. So the rates vary from time to time and from site to site.
Though proper values cannot be told, a rough standard is 2% average for an e-commerce site. Any value above 5% is contemplated as very good.
Still, never compare your values with anyone else’s site as they can differ drastically for the difference in tactics and web traffic, causing you unnecessary tension. On the other hand, it’s also essential to gradually increase your conversion rates, as improvements have no limit!
The bottom line
The benefits of conversion rate optimization are numerous. CRO makes sure that your store’s digital existence is on your website along with the entire web. It helps you make your site as effective as it can be made by constantly optimizing various things. A skilled conversion rate optimizer is the best way to get the work done in a brief period. It also improves the profits obtained from your business. Now you can effectively optimize your site after knowing everything about CRO and increase conversion rates. Conducting frequent testing can give your site a new look and also a new life!
